Files included in EMBOSS but licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs
Dear EMBOSS developers,
(CC Debian Med mailing list)
while working on upgrading Debian's emboss package to version 6.4.0
(congratulations, by the way), I found some files in EMBOSS that are
not considered ‘Free software’ by Debian. They were actually present
in past releases as well. Here is their list:
test/data/amir.swiss
test/data/uniprotft.sw
test/swiss/seq.dat
test/swnew/trembl.dat
and emboss/data/dbxref.txt
Their license is Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-ND
3.0), and it disallows modification of the files. The presence of these files
in EMBOSS makes it impossible for Debian to redistribute it in our operating
system. I have confirmed with the UniProt consortium's helpdesk that, even in
isolation, these files are covered by the CC BY-ND license. There are three
possible solutions.
a) Remove the files in Debian's EMBOSS package.
b) Distribute EMBOSS with the files, but in the non-free section of the Debian archive.
c) Replace the files by Free equivalents, for instance by re-creating records from scratch.
I am not very comfortable with any of the solutions, and was wondering if you
would have suggestions ?
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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